A package sat unopened on Donna Freitas’ table for weeks. She refused to read it. Inside, she knew, was something from her professor; once her mentor, now her stalker.
He was away for a month and insisted she read it during that time. He wanted to discuss it when he was back.
“The mere sight of the article on my coffee table filled me with a dread so profound I’m not sure I can ever convey its depths,” she writes in “Consent: A Memoir of Unwanted Attention” (Little, Brown), out Tuesday.
In the book, Freitas, a novelist and feminist-studies professor who lectures on sexual violence and Title IX on campuses nationally, tells her own story of harassment for the first time. Not only was her harasser a well-respected professor in his field — he was also a Catholic priest.
“I was thrilled by his attention, his affirmation of my intellectual worth, my academic talent,” Freitas writes. “He was like a diminutive and kindly grandfather, taking an interest in a young woman who might remind him of his granddaughter.”
Born in Rhode Island, Freitas received her BA in philosophy and Spanish before pursuing a Ph.D. in religion from a university she does not name in the book. There, she met Father L (her pseudonym for him) when she took his class during her first semester. “Writing this was not about revenge or outing anyone,” she told the Post. “It’s about telling my story in my own voice.”
Freitas loved being in school, and her dream was to become a professor herself. She was also pretty, with long brown hair, and dressed fashionably. Men noticed her, and she enjoyed the attention.
But soon Father L turned his attention to her.
When he handed back her final paper, there was a note on it asking if she would like to see a play with him. Flattered, Freitas said yes. She thought nothing of it at the time, but now she wonders if he thought of this as a date.
A few weeks after the play, she opened her campus mailbox to find a clipping about the basketball team she grew up rooting for. She had told Father L that she followed the team, along with other personal details about her life, and was again flattered he’d remembered her.
A few weeks after that, Father L showed up at her apartment, unannounced. “I was in the neighborhood,” he explained. She invited him in, and they had tea and a nice conversation. After he left, she writes, “I had my first flicker of doubt, a slight disquiet that nagged at me.” It wasn’t until later that she realized she’d never given him her address.
The next semester he continued leaving things in her mailbox. “But when the first letter from him arrived at my home address, I thought: Huh,” she writes.
“Even today . . . I am still full of doubt about everything that happened. Am I making too big a deal over it? Is it really innocent after all? It’s not as if he showed up in my apartment that day and grew violent or tried to have sex with me.”
Every time she went to his office that spring, he would ask if she was going to take another class with him. He asked what she wanted to learn and said he would teach it. He offered to plan his teaching around her schedule.
She didn’t sign up for a class with him, and so he began calling her at home. One day he asked her to come to a retreat house his abbey owned for a summer getaway. “I’ll have to get back to you,” she said. He pestered her about it over and over again, and she never said no. She just kept putting him off.
Finally, he called from the retreat house, offering to come get her.
‘Most of the time it’s not about someone who jumps out of the bushes with a knife. [Stalking] is much more subtle’
“In one semester, his attention had gone from a kind invitation to take me to the theater to inviting me to go away with him, just him,” she writes. “I don’t even know what the tipping point was … but the dread inside me . . . grew until it became monstrous.”
Meanwhile, Father L kept calling her, sometimes more than once a day. The letters increased. Sometimes there would be three a day. He would often be outside her classrooms when she emerged, as if he just happened to be there.
She never told anyone what was happening, partly because she herself wasn’t sure. And she needed a recommendation from Father L to go forward in her chosen career as a professor. The fact that he was a priest also gave her pause.
“I, like so many Catholics of the pre-scandal era, was overly prone to giving representatives of the Church the benefit of the doubt — completely.”
Eventually, she decided to read the article she had been avoiding for weeks. It made her feel so sick to open the envelope, she had to lie down on the floor. Inside was a confession of love. Not directly, instead it was an essay about a love affair between an older priest, “a famous writer and thinker, and a young woman 30 years his junior, with whom this man began a passionate and clandestine affair, one that was revealed to the public only many years after his death.”
After she finished reading, the phone rang. It was her father, revealing that her mother had cancer and she needed to go home immediately.
Freitas called Father L, devastated but also relieved. She finally had a good enough excuse to keep him away. “I won’t be around when you get back,” she said, and told him her mother was sick and that she was going home to be with her.
She actually believed the excuse would work. It didn’t.
A few days after her mother’s surgery, she returned to her family home in Rhode Island to find that he’d called her there, insisting she call back right away. He called again and again. He used the cancer as a new excuse to talk, wanting to know how she was, how her mother was, but really, she writes, he wanted to know if she’d read what he sent.
“Could I get together with him for coffee? For a play? To grab dinner?” he begged her. If not to talk about the article, he said, then to make sure she was OK.
Finally, she said no. At last, she “went from silent tolerance . . . to outright denial of his requests.” He began accusing her of being a bad friend; she began to despise him.
Freitas started dressing differently, in baggy jeans and sweatshirts. Sometimes she wouldn’t even shower. On campus, she would occasionally see him watching her from his office window. He was calling constantly now and writing to her mother, who — flattered by the kindness from a priest — wrote back.
Freitas began to pray Father L would attack her so she would have proof that something was wrong. “I wanted him to try to hurt me, to attack me, so I could finally believe myself,” she writes.
One day she was sitting at her parents’ kitchen table in Rhode Island when her mother said, “Isn’t it nice that Father L is going to visit us in January?”
It was then Freitas knew she had to tell someone.
She told a friend, who helped her tell a female professor they both knew well. The professor, who was shocked and sympathetic, advised her to make a list of grievances that she would read to Father L and tell him he was never to contact her again. But that did nothing.
Father L just wrote to her again, asking her how she could have cut him off.
This time, she went to the chair of the department, who was horrified. He insisted she report the situation to human resources and make it official. So she did. She knew she was placing her future in jeopardy by coming out publicly against a powerful man in her field, but she was assured by the chair that she must report it. A woman in HR assured her the behavior would be stopped, that a letter would be sent to him immediately and she would receive a copy.
But the letter she was supposed to receive never arrived. Later, when she found out that Father L was passing out the correspondence between himself and her mother to his students in a class on the nature of suffering, she went back to HR. The woman apologized and told her he would be placed on sabbatical, Freitas claims.
But when she got back to school after the summer break, Father L was still there. She finally went to the provost of the school and told him everything. When she finished her story, he only looked at her with contempt, she writes. Finally, she got a lawyer. That’s when she found out that the statute of limitations on filing an official complaint had run out while she’d been stymied by the human resources department, she claims. There were no consequences for Father L, but there were for Freitas.
He never gave her a letter of recommendation, which stood out as a red flag in interviews, she writes. Instead of becoming a full professor, she pursued writing, lecturing and work as a part-time professor. In the meantime, she learned to bury her experiences, revealing them to no one else for years, including the man she went on to marry. It wasn’t until she was lecturing on the complexity of consent in sexual-harassment cases that she realized she had an example from her own life. She started writing her memoir, many years before #MeToo.
Now that her secret is out, she says she hopes to “offer a forensic analysis of consent.”
“A relationship can move from a consensual one to a non-consensual one in ways that are hard to detect and rarely talked about,” Freitas told The Post. “Most of the time it’s not someone who jumps out of the bushes with a knife. It’s not always someone saying something sexually inappropriate. It’s much more subtle. I wrote this book to acknowledge that complexity.”